Mediabistro has been taking a look into the best and worst selling magazine covers in the US last year. For Time magazine the best selling cover was of Mark Zuckerburg, for New York magazine it was about the best place to live in New York. Mediabistro blog Fishbowl NY has pictures of the best selling covers.

The SPD blog previews Newsweek’s redesign as the US weekly merges with the Daily Beast. According to SPD, the new-look magazine is due in newsagents a week today. The post includes and interview with Dirk Barnett, the man behind the redesign, who discusses the new logo, how the team is “bringing strong, dynamic photojournalism back to Newsweek”, plus plans for presenting data.

Infographics, another element killed off over the past few years at Newsweek, will definitely be coming back. While we plan to up the presence, we have no plans to blow them out in a Bloomberg/Wired direction, our content just doesn’t require or sustain it (plus, Bloomberg Businessweek is killing it, who can compete with that?!). Rather, it will be a vital tool to telling elements of stories that photogrpahy or illustration just don’t nail. We have introduced a new page, DataBeast, that will give us the opportunity to do a weekly infogrpahic on various subjects.

The Center for Public Integrity, a US non-profit investigative journalism organisation, will provide exclusive content to Newsweek and the Daily Beast as part of a new agreement announced this week.

The Center’s executive director William Buzenberg said in a statement today that the new deal is a “tremendous opportunity” for the organisation to provide its journalism to a new audience and get paid for its work.

Someone claiming to be a Newsweek employee (or perhaps more than one individual) has written a heartfelt defence of Newsweek.com, following the news that the site will be closed after its merger with the Daily Beast:

The thing you have to understand about Newsweek is that it would only be fitting that its website would be the first to go. Like most print publications, Newsweek magazine has been led by people who deep down don’t understand the web, and because they don’t understand it, they fear it and don’t value it.

While high-level print editors were taking sleek black towncars to and from the office (and everywhere in between, including, on at least one instance, from DC to New York), this was a staff who slept on grimy couches while reporting on the road; forking out their own funds, at times, just to produce good work. The disparity in work hours, in pay, in resources – it was comical. And it was only telling that not so long ago – let’s say five years – one high-level company executive had to be corrected about the website’s URL: no, Newsweek.com wasn’t the same thing as the internal Newsweek intranet.

… In the face of indifference, condescension and even outright hostility from its print counterpart; with little to no resources; with more high-level hires and fires over the past couple of years than anybody could possibly count – and a revolving door of editors – the small but tireless staff at Newsweek.com consistently created editorial work that made waves: via a website, on video platforms, through multimedia, photo andsocial media. Whatever happens to Newsweek, we are all proud to have played a part in that.

It’s a wonderful new opportunity for all the brilliant editors and writers at the Daily Beast who have worked so hard to create the site’s success. Working at the warp-speed of a 24/7 news operation, we now add the versatility of being able to develop ideas and investigations that require a different narrative pace suited to the medium of print. And for Newsweek, the Daily Beast is a thriving frontline of breaking news and commentary that will raise the profile of the magazine’s bylines and quicken the pace of a great magazine’s revival.

More than 92,000 documents were released to WikiLeaks’ media partners earlier this year relating to military operations in Afghanistan, around 76,000 of which have so far been published by the WikiLeaks online while the remaining 15,000 were held back to undergo ‘harm minimisation review’.

The Washington Post has agreed to sell Newsweek to businessman Sidney Harman, the founder of one of the world’s largest audio equipment companies, reports the FT.

Harman said he is interested in “the publication’s mission” and was not investing in Newsweek to make a profit – just as well, given recent declines in the title’s ad pages and reported $30-million losses last year.